Monday, February 24, 2014

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know about this, but I figured I should post it here too: Hesky and I will be presenting on Plover at the NYC Accessibility Meetup today from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at Pivotal Labs, along with DIYAbility. I'll speak for 10 minutes on Plover's potential for various accessibility purposes, from conversational text to speech to captioning for Deaf and hard of hearing people, to the great potential in employing blind and low vision users of screen readers -- who have already honed their speech processing abilities to a very high degree -- as professional stenographers. So if you're in the city and free tonight, feel free to join the Meetup group and drop in tonight!

I'll also be demonstrating Plover with Vim, which I've been using exclusively in my day job for the past month and change (yep, quit the proprietary software cold turkey; nothing but Plover for weeks now, and not a single regret whatsoever! I love it, love it, love it.) There's a whole post in that, though, so I'll save it for later, perhaps with a video and a list of what-all I had to add to my vimrc. Stay tuned!

Thursday, February 13, 2014

First up, Josh is hard at work on the Stenosaurus, and in his most recent blog post, he gives us his working schematic of the design as it currently stands. He's definitely looking for comments from potential users before finalizing it, though, so if you've got any ideas, drop him a line.

The amazing Sveta from Audio Accessibility, a user experience expert, web designer, and accessibility consultant, is currently putting together a new consolidated website for The Open Steno Project, which should be much easier to navigate for potential users and contributors than the current sprawling tangle of links we have right now. She's put together a wireframe and is hoping for input from Plover users before refining it into HTML.

And finally, Boborama is working on a C-based sister/clone of Plover called StenoLite, and he's looking for feedback from testers, especially those with serial-based steno machines.